


Mariposa

by thumbipeach



Category: Purple Hyacinth - Ephemerys & Sophism (Webcomic)
Genre: Angst, F/M, I DONT KNOOWWWW, Please Kill Me, SIMP!Kieran, That is all, burn - Freeform, butterflies?????, i genuinely don’t know what this is, you can hear my repressed wailing in the background
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:53:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27479881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thumbipeach/pseuds/thumbipeach
Summary: Listen, Hyacinth.You can lose everything in your pursuit of her.You can lose your watch, your keys, your wallet and your very identity. You can lose the clothes on your back and the hair on your head, or as many fingers as you’d like so long as you can still pull a trigger. You can even lose your mind—if you have any left to give.You can lose anything save for one.Do not lose your heart.(Or: much to the detriment of his own happiness, Kieran White is a practical killer, and a rational man).
Relationships: Lauren Sinclair/Kieran White
Comments: 27
Kudos: 75





	Mariposa

**Author's Note:**

> **UHHHH AGAIN very mild trigger warning** some mentions of drugs, alcohol, and self harm. Love you all❤️

_  
The Doctor had asked, very politely in fact, if he would like to see the butterfly up close._

_He thinks he’d rather stay on the little stool than take up the Doctor’s offer to move. Because once the little pin had caught the light of the lamp, he’d understood his trajectory._

_“It’s quite simple, Kieran, really—“ he says, as casually as he would about the weather, as though a pin isn’t poised right at the juncture of the specimin’s thorax. His fingers are deft and sure after years of experience, and the little tray that holds the butterfly doesn’t waver in the slightest._

_“—puncture. Be quick.”_

_And with that, the silver of the pin trusts its new home, securing the butterfly to the sample card, and Kieran is left only internally discomforted as the Doctor holds it up, allowing the light to kiss it._

_Perhaps it was a hidden fascination with the science that kept him apprehensive. But Kieran knew that probably wasn’t true; he couldn’t tell the difference between a tiger swallowtail or a laurel even if he had the desire to. In the end, though their colors shifted like rainbows caught in prisms and their movements were amusing, butterflies were all one in the same._

_This one, the Doctor told him, is a Colias Wiskotti, and its plumage is made into a thin veneer of creamsicle orange as he lets the lamplight pierce its translucent wings._

_“Come take a look, son.”_

_Kieran shakes his head, his hands gripping the stool beneath him firmly. Blood drips onto the floor from where his wound has opened, perhaps from the exertion of restraint._

_“Apostle--”_

_“Don’t.” He admonishes. “I’d like to escape it for a while.”_

_Kieran clears his throat. “Sure._ Doctor.”

_He stops, eyeing the wall filled with lepidoptera, little marble cubes of Parides and Papilios, of nothing truly alive. Everything was perfectly preserved, in wispy resin and thumbtacks._

_“--why do you do all this?”_

_The Doctor looks at him blankly. Kieran feels the uncomfortable, warm sensation of red cascading down his arm, and whimpers slightly. It hurts._

_“Can you please just fix this—?”_

_“Quiet. Be patient, son.”_

_His voice takes on that trademark low noise that comes when Kieran knows he’s done something out of line, so he shuts up._

_“Don’t you think they’re beautiful?” He asks, voice reverent as his gooseberry eyes scan the majestic animals, their heartbeats stilled each with their own little black pin._

_Kieran looks at them, his face contorting out of instinct. “Not...really--”_

_“Oh?”_

_“No, I mean--” he looks down. Blood is practically pooling at this point. He feels woozy--but perhaps that's the little puncture wound on his other arm telling him that._

_“Wouldn’t...forgive me--wouldn’t they look better alive, Doctor?” He asks tentatively._

_The Doctor turns to him slowly. His gaze is as though Kieran is just another specimen, shoved under a microscope and told to die for the sake of aesthetic._

_“You think?”_

_“I…” he struggles to speak, and his back slouches in the chair._

_“I--I know they’re beautiful when they fly.” He says, looking over at the table with the butterflies, all laid out in neat rows of blue and black and cream and scarlet, scarlet. He’s tired of scarlet; he wishes it would turn white._

_“These--these seem useless. They don’t fly at all.”_

_The Doctor begins to make his way over to him, setting down the Wiskotti on a tray and slinking his broad hands into his pockets, concealing the black whorls of the tattoo on his pulsepoint. The images and colors begin to blur together as Kieran slips into a haze characterized as a fraction of clarity._

_“They aren’t, son.” He hears him say; it sounds warped, as though he’s been plunged underwater._

_“You see--” he can hear something like a smile in his voice, even now, because he’d been trained to detect these things, know emotion like he would know his own fingertips._

_“--They’re better off this way--dead.”_

_Kieran doesn’t say anything. Maybe it’s because he can’t bring himself to move his lips now, or because he truly can’t find any adequate response._

_“If they were alive, their beauty would be fleeting.” He says, waving a hand clad in starchy white._

_“If they were alive, they’d fly away—and really, you wouldn’t be able to see much of them at all.”_

_He can only nod, as something is finally, finally pressed to his wound, a wound he inflicted when he fell from that woman’s window, after he’d slit her throat and whispered a hyacinth into her blood._

_“Now--now they’re here, and I can look at them whenever I please.”_

_“Hm.”_

_“That’s the thing about death, son.”_

_Kieran doesn’t say anything, and this time it’s because his eyelids have snapped shut, and he can’t feel his own movements anymore. Perhaps he is the butterfly, and a needle is about to be pressed to his chest and called a necessity._

_“In mortality, there is the slightest root of immortality.”_

_He hums, fingering the slip of a giant swallowtail._

_“It’s funny, isn’t it?”_

_When his patient doesn’t respond, the Doctor only sighs._

_“Only a paradox. Stay, son. I’ll take care of it.”_

_There is some kind of immortality, in not having any life at all._

////

The first thing he hears his new target say is a critique on the bar’s drink selection.

“Don’t get the gin, whatever you do,” Lauren Sinclair informs him, when he sidles up to the bar and twiddles his long fingers in consideration.

Of course, it’s not casual--he’d planned this, having observed her over the weeks he’d known he’d have to end her life. She always came here on Wednesday evenings; he supposed even officers had private rituals.

“Oh?” He smiles, grinning in that way that had most women clutching at their necklaces and brushing their skirts self-consciously, as though he’d steal both and leave them with nothing. Maybe he would; he was a criminal, after all.

She doesn’t seem to be affected, merely shaking her head. “I swear. They put an olive in it to try and dress it up--but it’s a pig in the end, y’know?”

He chuckles, nodding and making mental note of the fact--just in case. “Noted, darling. Anything else I should know?”

She eyes him keenly, and it’s then that he truly manages to study her face head on. 

He feels as though he shouldn’t be looking for too long. 

For she is beautiful--long red hair and delicate lashes creating a canopy over melting, golden eyes--and she reminds him too much of the pins and the orange wings. If he looked at her for too long, he’d have to kill her and put her in a box to replicate the feeling of looking at her for the first time.

Perhaps _that’s_ what he’d meant, all those years ago. That brand of selfishness--that is what leads a man to murder.

“Hm.” She pouts her full lip, fingers the little gold police insignia at her wrist in thought.

“I say go for the beer. It’s always best, to go simple with these things.”

Kieran leans against the marble countertop, lets the heat from the stained glass lamps scorch his skin. He angles his body so she is his only focus, and it’s only because she’s supposed to be.

_Lauren Sinclair, they’d said, pronounced her name like a gangplank sentence._

_Lauren Sinclair, niece of the Chief of Police, young and athletic and eerily smart._

_Lauren Sinclair. don’t get too close to her; just enough to kill her._

_She’s good._

“ **Well. I’ll be sure to get it next time I’m here.”**

The look on her face almost pauses in its trajectory, and all at once her perfect, pensive eyes curl in suspicion. They didn’t lie when they told him she was good--not at all.

“Don’t bother, then. It’s alright.” She waves her hands. “I wasn’t--”

“Hey--” he frowns. “Who said anything about that, officer?”

She raises her eyebrows. “I don’t exactly know what you’re trying to solicit, sir, but—“

_Whatever you do, don’t try and make excuses._

“Hey.” He stops, his voice and face suddenly very serious. His tone isn’t conversational anymore, and he purposefully lets all the jovial friendliness drop to the floor, discarded as just another mask. Kieran makes it all a great show: he fingers his collar, he runs a hand abstractedly through his dark hair. Anything, anything to show that he is emotional, human, full of life.

On the inside he feels like cotton.

“I’m so sorry to bother you like this—“ he starts, and she blinks slowly, her hand slowly edging to her hip, in an instinctive, protective gesture. He resists the urge to smile.

“—but I have to let you know something, Miss.” He says.

Her face doesn’t let up. Her pretty features twist into a sneer, and she shifts her drink farther from him. 

“You’ll say it here. I’m not following you anywhere.”

He allows a small smile to drip onto his lips. “Of course. You’re smart—I’m not going to try and insult your intelligence.”

She smiles a half moon. “Thank you, for your consideration...Sir…?”

He shakes his head. “My name will come later. But— _Lauren Sinclair,_ is that right?”

She looks vaguely startled, but then seems to remember that it wouldn’t be a stretch to say half the bar knows who she is. Her colors stand out in a din of blues and blacks and browns, and her eyes are unmistakable. Really, if she weren’t so clever, she’d be a walking target, a helpless, dainty butterfly.

"That's correct."

"I have to tell you--" and here he leans forward, pretending to take her into his confidence. He looks around conspiratorially, raises his arm so it extends in between the both of them, reaches--

And then hesitates slightly. Lauren reacts to the beat with skepticism, her hand closing further around her rose-gold handle.

Kieran draws back ever so slightly, his voice low.

_"Someone is trying to kill you."_

She rears back violently, her eyes very wide. Quickly, she scans the room around her, hands unsure around her pistol.

_"Who--"_

_"If I understand--"_ he stops. "You’re able to tell that I’m not trying to decieve you in any way.”

He can see abject, palpable alarm flood into her face as he says this, and he finds some victory in it. 

“How do you know this—?!” She breathes.

“I just—“ he sighs. “I do. It’s sort of...my profession, you could say.”

She clicks her tongue. “You said you did not want to insult my intelligence.”

Kieran shakes his head, flashing her another charming, crooked grin. “No, darling—it is a rather pretty wit.”

She leans forward suddenly, and he wouldn’t be surprised if she was a particularly skilled huntress, if she couldn’t take him down and leave him nothing more than a taxidermy. He wouldn’t be much; just dried hyacinth petals, regret, and the soft scent of sulphur, but scientists would study him for ages, as the predator’s mark, a final problem.

“Then you’ll tell me all you know.”

He tells her, in flowery words tinged with the hint of a sultry beer that, he has to admit, is actually good, that she is in grave danger, that he knows this as fact because he knows the people who are going to do it.

“Why me?” She asks, pretty mouth curved in anxiety and fingers clutching her glass. He stares at her, her calculating expression, like she’s asked a question she already knows the answer to.

He closes his eyes in a slow blink, almost apologetic.

“Some people—they just have goals.”

Later, stumbling out of the bar after informing her that he’ll keep in touch, he mentally kicks himself.

It would have been easier, and not have required this much deception, if he hadn’t stopped himself from tossing the little white pill into her drink, unobtrusive. 

But he’d hesitated.

Perhaps if he knew why, he could write it down, draw it out like he’d draw out a swallowtail’s plumage, and rip out the pages into shards destined for the scrap bin.

Now, he has to play with something akin to fire.

The Doctor was right; beautiful things are better off dead.

///

_“You didn’t take the opportunity? That is unlike you.”_

_“I did not see it prudent. The bartender—and others, they were drawn by her voice.”_

_“Hm. I understand. Good call, then.”_

_“I’ll be sure to take the next window.”_

_“Sometimes, the opening is lost, and you have to give it up. That’s how you hunt effectively. However—“_

_“The one thing you mustn’t do is hesitate.”_

_“_ **_I won’t.”_ **

_///_

Except that’s not really true, because he’s starting to enjoy the beautiful feeling of earning her trust.

“You again.” She says, surprise written on her face like a sonnet. They’re in the marketplace, and she’s still in her crisp navy uniform, fabric dripping down her guns and weapons like a waterfall. She’s braided her fiery hair into a neat plait, and little bits of light nest in the tips like flower petals. He has to fish his voice out of his throat.

“We meet, darling.” He looks pointedly at her basket, a terry cloth packet filled with vegetables of myriad hues. She still looks wary around him, and he supposes she has every right to be. 

“You’re going to tell me I shouldn’t be out here.” She says sourly, tossing a summer squash in her fingers, catching it by the middle. He can feel the taste of it burst on his tongue, and regrets ever talking to her in the first place, regrets the fact that he has to end her life, at some point.

“No. I’m not going to tell you that.” He looks around, scanning the throng of people that shift in waves around them. The Ardhalis market is always sunbathed and warm like the cockles of a hearth, and he often hates it, how safe that mere fact of temperature makes him feel.

“I—“ she stops. “You said someone is trying—“

He shushes her quickly, looking around again. As though her assailant isn’t right in front of her. 

“Yes. I said that. Which is why—“ he points to her hip, where her pistol is still locked in a loving embrace. “I recommend you keep that with you.”

She stops, setting down the squash slowly. “What on earth do you think I’ll have to do—shoot whoever this mysterious stalker is right in the marketplace?”

He opens his mouth to say that yes, it would be the best option, but she cuts him off, now brandishing a tomato in his face.

“I am— _a police officer!_ Surely I know how to handle things like this.”

Kieran throws back his head and laughs, and she shoves him slightly, nearly crushing the tomato onto his nice, pressed blazer. 

“No, no! I’m aware of you, officer—I trust you’ll keep yourself out of trouble.”

She bites her lip at this, and when he looks down at her again her face is suddenly serious. 

“You still haven’t told me anything about this. I know you’re not lying—but you’re not telling me the whole truth either.” 

He pauses, rubbing the back of his neck. Picking up a tomato in his other hand, he tosses it in the air, watches the thin skin permeate light into its hold.

“I’d be willing. What would you like to know, darling?”

She thinks.

“Your name.”

He stops.

She raises a perfectly arched brow expectantly, canting her hip and shifting her coat over her shoulders. Her badge catches the sunlight, and the hyacinth insignia glints gold. He freezes in his tracks, barely managing to catch the tomato in steady fingers as he suspended it in air.

“I’m afraid I can’t—not yet.”

She hums. “Okay. Then I’ll do it for you—“

She learns forward, right into his space, and he catches a whiff of honey and fresh books.

“—Kieran White.”

He starts, nearly stumbling forward and falling face first into bitter lemons.

“How—“

She smirks, and he thrills at the way it looks on her, triumph.

“Asked at the bar. Apparently you go there often, White.”

_He should get it over with here, drag her to the apex of the world and rid himself of this nightmarish hell where he still can feel--_

She turns, swinging her bag of food over her shoulder, throwing one last glance at him before the startling candor of her hair is swathed in the shifting sea of bodies.

“You should really be more careful.”

///

_Sometimes, when the Doctor would bring in a particularly fetching set of wings, he’d ask him to draw it._

_Kieran didn’t really enjoy doing it, particularly; after all, there was something depressing, having just taken a life and then turning around and preserving another on paper like it was something to be ogled at. But he couldn’t exactly refuse, so he’d ensconce himself on a chaise and stare at a Painted Lady or a White Admiral until his eyes were filled with their colors, and his pencil strokes would be uneven, but he’d do it._

_He hated the purple ones the most. Any of them; the Emperors were rife, so he’d have to subject himself to that kind of torture too._

_“You’re good.” The Doctor says, watching over his shoulder. He wishes he could close himself in, lock a door behind him and draw whatever was alive in the room, which couldn’t be anything but the stray mice picking at the wall plaster._

_“Perhaps you could be a sketch artist.” He smiles knowingly. “You know. For autopsies.”_

_He doesn’t laugh._

///

“I’m still alive,” she says dryly, waving her fingers. 

They’re in a cafe together, and he can almost feel the prickle of eyes watching the nape of his neck, skirting down his sides. It’s like the fake eyes of those butterflies to deter predators; large, hollow and yellow with jaundiced pretense.

They’re watching, to see if he’s still a good hunter, if he’s still adept at what they force him to do.

“That you are.” He mutters, swirling a straw in his drink. He feels lead in his stomach. 

“You seem put out.” She scoffs. “Why? Don’t tell me _you_ wanted me dead.”

He looks up sharply, his gaze intense and fearful. What does one do, at an impasse? Apologize?

Hasn’t he done enough of that?

“...No. Of course not.”

She smirks. “So. Will you help me or not?”

“With what?”

She leans over the scones, and he feels a trip of anxiety course through him. Surely, there would be people looking at them, the odd red and black couple with strange fires in their gaze. They were perfect specimens of animosity, and studying them diligently under a microscope would probably reveal a lot; of how predators and prey worked. 

“Staying alive.” She smiles. “It’s only fair, I think. White.”

He can’t help but grin. He does like her--something about the way she slinks her way into his defense like the sharp side of a needle; it’s frightening, but keeps him coming back again and again. He’s the poor little moth, drawn to a flame.

He’s a fool.

He can hear the echo like a chant, can almost feel the crawl of someone’s disapproving eyes on his back, and he reels backward. She looks at him skeptically, but he only waves a hand, hiding the uneasy tremble of his lips behind the lip of his mug.

“I can’t.”

She scoffs. “Why not?”

“Because--” steam floods his eyes, and he almost tells her the whole thing, gets onto his knees and asks her to cut him, to stick the pin of her disapproval in his chest. 

“I can’t. Really. It won’t work like that.”

She stares at him for a time, like his very being is made of gossamer, so thin she can see the scars beneath his unbuttoned collar. 

Then she rises, dusting scone crumbs off of her black skirt and making for the door.

“You’re no help.”

He shakes his head, watching her go and feeling, once again, that his time was short.

“I never said I was going to be the one to help you.”

///

_“What do you think you’re doing?”_

_“I felt it prudent to gain her trust, first. Before I killed her.”_

_“Is that so?”_

_“If you doubt me, I suggest you find someone else for the job.”_

_It hurts. Has he been stung? It hurts, something hurts._

_“Don’t get cheeky. Remember who you are, Hyacinth.”_

_“...Right.”_

_“The Leader finds you amicable--but that doesn’t mean you can do whatever you wish.”_

_It hurts. It always hurts. But something more today--some ache in his chest, his core, that makes him wish he could scream. It would be raw, like honeycomb, straight from his throat. And bitter, like bile._

_The Apostle sighs._

_“Listen, Hyacinth._

_You can lose everything in your pursuit of her._

_You can lose your watch, your keys, your wallet and your very identity. You can lose the clothes on your back and the hair on your head, or as many fingers as you’d like so long as you can still pull a trigger._

_You can even lose your mind—if you have any left to give._

_You can lose anything save for one._

_Do not lose your heart.”_

_“I--”_

_“Understood?”_

_He sighs. That hurts too._

_“I understand.”_

///

He doesn’t understand.

He turns to find her staring at him. They’re in a library, pouring over the papers she’d managed to squirrel away in her skirts--potential suspects.

“Stealing, are we, Sinclair?”

She hits his arm with a manila folder, and she smells like the vanilla of coffee creamer and the heavenly scent of books untouched by thousands of undeserving fingers. 

“I have the right--”

“Oh, Miss _perfect, good cop_ has the right to _steal,_ does she?”

She shakes her head, laughing. He knows it’s gotten to the point of danger, because he finds he’ll do just about anything to hear her laugh like that again. It’s as though she’s a butterfly for his own pleasure, his own gratification. And he’ll do anything for her to lean into him, for her to trust him, for her to be his endearment. 

_She wouldn’t. Once she finds out he’ll have to kill her._

_But he can preserve that, like the butterflies in resin. Just this once, he can keep that euphoric feeling, stay in this moment. He wouldn’t dare do that to her, but just this once he can--_

“Are you listening?”

He snaps back to, staring into a grainy photograph of a mangy man. 

“Is it him?”

He ignores the bright scar over his face, the lust in his eyes for cruelty. “No.”

“Hm.” She sighs. “Then I’m out of options.”

“Look.” He shakes his head, leaning back in against the chair. His voice is a whisper, trying not to disturb the others in the library. He can posit the woman at the front desk is eyeing him, but he desperately tries to ignore it.

“I told you because--because I wanted to help you. But you’re not going to get anything out of me--”

“Why?” Lauren prompts, her fingers dancing over more files, her eyes on his. “What’s so secret?”

_My secret is my loss. What I have forsaken to get here._

_What I lost._

The librarian is _really_ looking at him, like a bug under a microscope. He can feel the people behind the bookshelves too, and the couple by the door. He’s been trained, the Hyacinth; trained to notice these types of things and act accordingly.

He clears his throat, trying to distract himself. Scanning the room, his eyes pick up on the first thing that pops into his head.

“That--” he points. “That book. I hadn’t seen it in ages.”

She turns to follow his finger, and when her eyes scan the bridge of _The Secret Garden_ he wonders if she’ll laugh. He hopes she’ll laugh.

She does, chiming like a bell, soft into her fingertips. “Me too! It’s been a while.”

“Did you like it?”

She shrugs her shoulders. “I don’t know. Something about Colin never sat right with me.”

Kieran frowns. “He learns.”

“Yes.” She nods. “But there are so many people like him who won’t get that push. And even then--that selfish nature, it’ll still be there.”

Unease. “He changes, doesn’t he?”

Lauren smiles. “Once a killer, always a killer, that’s what we say.”

“Oh.”

Silence, as befits a library, where a collection of all the world’s knowledge is buried.

“Well.” She snaps the book shut. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”

Curse him. Curse him.

“Yeah.”

///

_Something happens._

_He swims in red, like a monarch in streaks of blood orange and black. He hates it, it feels like veins in his lungs and chest and neck._

_Something happens, and yet when he gets back to his room and unlocks the door in ritual, nothing manages to occur._

_He wants, so desperately, to draw her face. But all that comes is a stubborn butterfly._

///

“You seem--” He stops, collecting his breath. “You seem subdued, today.”

It’s true enough. Her eyes don’t light with her usual golden spark, and she rests her head on her chin and moves her heels languidly in on the cobblestone. He basks under the streetlamp, pressing his fingers into its ridges, feeling the cool metal like butter on his skin.

“There was a murder last night.”

He stops. “Oh?”

She nods solemnly. “The Hyacinth--stupid thing. God--”

She shakes her head. “He is a _monster._ He probably has no remorse.”

He forgets himself. He forgets a lot of things, but what he forgets the most is his doctor’s advice--not to lose himself.

**“No. I’m sure he doesn’t.”**

She stills. 

Slowly, realization floods into her face, and he knows he’s botched it, botched it irreparably. But he couldn’t care less. He just watches in something akin to rapture as the past few months of liaisons come rushing into her head, and pool into one conclusion.

_“You.”_ She growls. She starts up from the bench, her blue coat swaying around her knees like a jeer, reels backwards until she’s the furthest from him she can be while still managing to kill him. 

“Lauren--”

“You _liar.”_ She hisses, clutching at her gun. “I--god, how long have I been--”

“I should have killed you.” He says, desperate, as if digging himself into a bigger grave would help him out of the flames he lit. “That day, the first. I would have--I would have put something in your drink and that would have been it.”

She breathes out, horrified, and he hates the look on her face as much as he loves it, because he’s come to--

_Don’t try and make excuses with Lauren Sinclair. Because she’s good._

_She’s good. She’s everything good in this world, with her normalities, with the books and vegetables and the butterflies._

“But I didn’t”

_“Evidently!”_ She near shrieks, but then remembers that she’ll be looked at funny, and she does care, somewhat, about how she is perceived. 

“I--” he stops, looking down at his palms, where he can see red and the phantom of a Wiskotti’s heartbeat. 

“I hesitated. I hesitated then, and I hesitated every moment after that.”

He looks up at her. “I hesitated, Lauren.”

She sneers, a lovely thing of pristine white silk and pianist perfection, grips her pistol so tight he can see her knuckles turning the same hue. 

“And you think I give a _damn, you--”_ She inhales sharply, hysterically. “I don’t--how could--”

“Are you going to turn me in?” he laughs. “You know, the funny thing is--I don’t care.”

She stops. “You don’t?”

“No.” He laughs, laughs and laughs. “No, I don’t.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t mind, really.”

She stares at him, all murderous fury, gun still pressed in her palms, fingertips teasing a tigger. Then, slowly, she backs away.

“Don’t touch me. Don’t come near me ever again.”

He nods. “Okay.” 

And she does the worst thing she could possibly do in this instance, which is give Kieran White amity, give a monster his mercy.

“If I see you again, that’ll be it.” She says, still walking backward. Lauren disappears into the night, like a moth astray, like butterflies after the sun vanishes. 

“Okay.” He agrees, so quiet only he can hear.

_Okay._

///

_Sometimes, when he’d just about had enough, he’d sneak into the butterfly room and try to let one go._

_The first time, he hadn’t really understood their state. He’d taken one out of its glass prison, held it up, and tried to set it free._

_When the Doctor found out, he was furious. He pressed bruises into his wrists, tried to hurt him as much as he would have deserved, but what hurt him more was the impressed vision of the dead butterfly in his palms. It bore wings, yet couldn’t fly._

_Now, faced with lashings and strips of blood, he feels the converse of that. He feels a staunch euphoria, like when he’d heard her laugh or when she’d hold a hand up to hide her smile, when she’d tilt her head and listen to him._

_“Are you happy with yourself?” The Doctor says, disdain dripping from his weapons and his face. Kieran coughs, burbles blood at the corners of his lips. He wished, for the last time, that he could hold her again, cup her in his palms even just to let her go. He wished so very fervently, for things beyond his control._

_“Yes.” He croaked out, for another lashing._

_“I am happy.”_

_Not a lie._

_“You’ve gone and done it.”_

_“Perhaps I have.”_

_When hunting, it’s important that you don’t endear yourself to your prey. It isn’t good, to fall in love with the doe you need to see dead._

_It’s even worse when the doe is a fox, and the fox knows how to make you lose your mind._

_But he’ll face it. Because he likes the butterflies, still indulges in the way looking at them makes him feel. And he’ll draw her one last time, because it’s only fair to her that he keeps her away from him._

_He’s lost, but it feels like something whole again. Finally, after years of being mindlessly stained, he is shattered glass._

///

He sees her for the final time when he’s out of his own mind.

He feels the alcohol coursing through his veins as he bounds the rooftops, impulsively searching for a heartbeat of red and yellow. He’d gone back and had that beer, even the gin, and she was right (she always is), it was awful. The olive didn’t help.

Kieran still has immaculate accuracy, his toes catching the lip of the roof’s seams with precision, as he flirts with death. He unbuttons his collar, lets the wind kiss his skin, opens his mouth and breathes out harshly.

And then he spots her, a shining beacon in a colorless street, and he immediately flings himself into a corner to watch. 

She’s with two others; her friends, probably. One blue, one gold, and she loops her arms around both of them and laughs, that laugh that makes him wish he _could_ die happy without it. They step in time, and the blue one says something particularly riveting, twirls her fingers in the air and makes the golden one groan in exasperation.

He can see it all playing out like a picture film, and he almost laughs with them, almost loses another part of himself when he longs for company, for the mere fact of camaraderie that he never got to earn.

Then, Lauren stops, and for a moment he is paralyzed as she holds her proud head up to the air, her face caught in time. Slowly, she turns, until her eyes land a little ways off from where he’s nestled himself.

_Run, his mind supplies. Run, run run._

_And because he has always listened to that cowardly voice in his head, he does._

He leaves.

He can’t risk it, again. He can’t risk losing to the huntress.

///

_Once, he remembered very vividly, the Doctor had brought in a live specimen, a Red Admiral fresh from the park. It made sense; everything dead had to be alive at some point in time._

_He remembers the little red thing beating frantically against the glass cage, its scarlet wings fluttering to bright orange in the sunlight. The Doctor had cooed over it, his eyes agleam with delight, and had placed it on the countertop for that night, when it would meet its end._

_Kieran didn’t exactly recall what had come over him, but watching the butterfly paint itself into desperation, he suddenly followed a strange impulse that had been brewing for a very long time._

_That night, he slowly snuck into the room, ignoring the way the butterflies in their cases seemed to stare at him with the judgement of a cavalry, and took the glass in his hands, gently, as though it would shatter if he held it for too long. It would, he didn’t doubt; destruction was his birthright._

_Then, making his way outside the complex, he pried open the cage, and took the butterfly in his palms. This time its wings beat a steady tune, and he feels it, its life in his palm. For a moment, he considers what it would be like to snuff that out like a candle, close his palms and feel the insect fit flush to his boyish hands. He considers being selfish and obedient, of keeping its beauty forever in plaster._

_But his humanity wins out, the part of him that admires the simple beauty of being alive, of knowing things have unknown trajectories by nature._

_So, he raises his palms to the sky, and watches as the red dot that darts out of them flits into oblivion._

_Run, his mind screams. Run, run, run, run._

_He’ll get beaten, or if he’s lucky, hanged so he can’t breathe again, can’t feel life constricting his throat. But for now he lives in the moment, what he promised to do._

_He does the same now. Because there’s some catharsis in not having what you want, because there is some pleasure in being an unfulfilled sybarite, because there is immortality in mortality._

_And he is a rational man. He knows what he has to do._

_He lets the butterfly go._

**Author's Note:**

> Don’t ask me what’s going on in this fic because I literally have no clue. I don’t know. Really. Sorry. Ahhhhhh
> 
> Annnnd now for my final act, I will ✨disappear for another 2 months✨ Thank you for having me! Also, please direct your attention to the TLoF chapter count :”) that’s right ladies and gents, six more left!! Hope to have you along for the ride ❤️
> 
> Much love everyone! I sincerely apologize for whatever the hell is going on here, hope you like it 🤡comments/kudos are my blueberry scones <3
> 
> Insta: @artsofisha
> 
> -thumbipeach


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